Kurt Cobain Planned To Fire Bandmate In New York

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While most think of Nirvana as a three piece that included Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic, and Dave Grohl, the band went through quite a few different lineups over the years. At one point in time the band even had a fourth member that not all casual fans are aware of (and no, we’re not talking about Pat Smear).

Jason Everman was a guitarist in Nirvana for the first half of 1989 and only appeared on a single song: a cover of Kiss’ “Do You Love Me.” After Everman left the band, he joined Soundgarden as their bassist before being forced out in 1990.

During an interview with Booked on Rock, Robert Boyd (who wrote “Before the Storm: The Formative Years of America’s Last Great Band”) discussed Everman’s short stint with Nirvana and how two of his then-bandmates considered abandoning him on tour.

“He financed ‘Bleach.’ ‘Bleach’ cost a little over $600.00, multiple days at Reciprocal Recording. And he financed that after he had kind of entered Nirvana’s universe,” Boyd said of the band’s debut album. “Kurt thought, ‘Well, we could use a guitarist for touring,’ and he fit the bill. They didn’t really know him well. Chad Channing [drummer] did know him because they both were from Bainbridge Island, but Krist and Kurt did not know him.”

However, it wasn’t long before it became clear that Everman was not working out for the band.

“They quickly learned that their personalities did not mesh once the tour began in the summer of ’89. So, they played throughout June and July, made it to New York, and Kurt and Krist had actually had the plan to just leave him there. They didn’t want him in the band, they wanted to just flee. Flee in the night. And they thought better of it. But they canceled the remainder of the tour. They just could not deal with Jason Everman anymore.”

“And I’ve seen some of the footage from shows from that summer, and he is very animated on stage,” Boyd continued. “A lot of headbanging, he’s a ‘metal guy.’ There’s a few shows from that particular tour, there’s one show where he actually dives off the stage, it might have been in New Jersey. And he assaults someone in the crowd, so it was those type of things that they didn’t fit with the Nirvana that everyone knows and would eventually know.”

While Everman played in two of grunge’s biggest bands, he eventually went on to serve in the U.S. Army as an Army Ranger and Green Beret, doing tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan.